The letter reads in small part, "I make use of my earliest opportunity to acknowledge the receipt of a copy of your official Report of your Campaign in Penn, last summer. Its perusal has afforded me infinite satisfaction...You doubtless know that I was educated for a regular, or trained soldier, and until the War of the Rebellion, I had been made to believe that the strength of a military power lay in its trained troops, and my conviction remained unchanged until the battle of Williamsburg...In that fight the greater part of my troops were under fire for the first time, and many of whom, I have no doubt, had never before heard the report of the discharge of a musket, and yet they went into battle at the earliest dawn, at one time engaged with unusual violence, and stuck to it until night came...". A cocky Joseph Hooker, commanding the Army of the Potomac, had the misfortune to be thrashed by Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville. Here, shortly before his death, the retired Hooker writes to a general in the Pennsylvania National Guard. The letter's recipient, Henry Shippen Huidekoper, had commanded the150th Pennsylvania during the Civil War and remained in uniform until 1880.

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